Top women 2026: Marcy Campbell
She values revenue and relationships
By Paula Aven Gladych
Special to the Business Times
Marcy Campbell, chief revenue officer at AppFolio, didn’t plan on having the career she has had for more than 30 years, but fell into it because of her curiosity and passion for technology.
She earned bachelor’s degrees in history and communications from the University of Hartford, but spent time doing a thesis on how technology communication was going to change the world, “which sounds old-fashioned now,” she said, but her first job in sales at IBM gave her 18 months of training on how to sell to enterprise customers.
“I loved it. I found I was good at that. I excelled at it. I loved my interactions with customers, being a customer-first company. Listening to their problems and providing solutions to their problems has always been exciting to me,” Campbell said.
She has led high-performance sales and service teams and has grown businesses across multiple industries, including fintech, data analytics, cloud computing, SaaS, PaaS and data communications.
She stayed in sales for many years, moving into sales management and then operations for big and small companies, including a number of startups. Campbell also has invested in forward-thinking technologies.
Campbell joined the team at AppFolio 19 months ago, filling a newly created position. She is in charge of all customer-facing parts of the organization, starting with BDR, sales, revenue operations, customer onboarding, success and support for all customers and prospects.
AppFolio is a platform-based property management software that applies agentic artificial intelligence to do the busywork so teams can focus on building meaningful connections with residents, investors and owners.
“Prior to me joining, services and sales were separate with redundant operations,” Campbell said. “I integrated the two organizations and built out the train tracks for the customer experience. That’s been a fun journey. I love the fact that we are customer-obsessed as a company. It is one of our core values.”
During her tenure at AppFolio, the company has experienced strong growth and high retention rates, with full-year 2025 revenue increasing 20% year-over-year to $951 million, and total units under management growing 8% to 9.4 million.
Before coming to work for AppFolio, she held leadership roles at Braintree and Qubole and senior executive roles at Boomi and PayPal, where her leadership spanned global merchant sales operations, technical enablement, support and go-to-market execution for solutions.
“I knew what I was looking for when I first had a conversation with Appfolio,” she said. “I was looking for a value-based company that was obsessed with customers, that cared about people and I was looking for something that would be at scale.”
The great thing about AppFolio is that “they care about their people. The experience so far for me has been very positive. We made a lot of changes, and my team has leaned into those changes. Most people don’t, they push back, but I haven’t experienced that at all.”
Jordy Brazier, senior vice president of SalesForce, worked for Campbell at Qubole and PayPal.
“She is the most extraordinary sales leader I have met,” he said, “not only for myself from a relationship standpoint but pure people leadership.”
He described Campbell as the best mentor he could have ever hoped for, giving him confidence that he could take on such a role at a Fortune 500 company.
“She is one of the most competitive leaders you can think of, one of the most intense, but the beauty is the amount of energy she has,” he said. “She is able to motivate entire organizations to do the impossible, to go against big competitors and win,” he said.
Brazier added that Campbell is “truly a force of nature. She makes you feel that everything is possible and that’s a very powerful thing in sales, in anything, actually.”
Campbell gains inspiration from women who help other women. She has worked with the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women and believes that the wife of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is inspiring for what she does for other women.
“I believe in inspiring women,” she said. Campbell worked with the foundation to help four women build out their businesses and also works with the Asian University for Women, where Blair is a board member.
“I had the pleasure of meeting her once and she was super impressive. The fact that she spends her time helping underserved women get into positions of power is amazing,” she said.
Campbell has served on many boards, including Code Climate, a leader in engineering intelligence software, Zix Corp., a public company acquired by OpenText, and NextRoll, a leading marketing automation software company in Silicon Valley. She is also an advisor and seed investor for 40 startups in Silicon Valley.
She lives in Arroyo Grande with her husband and is active in the Rocky Mountain Horse Association, entering endurance races throughout the Central Coast region.
email: [email protected]
